Ashraf Karim is Senior Vice President of Connected Customer Experiences & Technology at ServiceNow, where he leads the charge on transforming how enterprises engage customers through AI-powered digital workflows. With over two decades spanning engineering, product management, and executive leadership at Google, PayPal, Affirm, and Cisco, Karim bridges the gap between deep technical fluency and strategic business thinking. He is known for championing simplicity-first design, advocating that reducing cognitive load at every customer touchpoint is the defining discipline of great product leadership.
Alfonso Villanueva is the EVP, Chief Transformation Officer and Interim CEO of Verizon Consumer Group - the largest consumer wireless carrier in the United States. A former McKinsey Senior Partner and PayPal EVP, he joined Verizon in November 2025 at the invitation of new CEO Dan Schulman, his former PayPal colleague, to lead a sweeping $5B+ operational transformation. With roots in strategy consulting across Asia-Pacific and two decades of experience in telecom, media, and technology, Villanueva brings a rare blend of corporate venture expertise, AI-driven data strategy, and global transformation leadership to one of America's biggest companies.
Zahid Shaikh is the Co-Founder and Head of Risk Products at Sardine, an AI-powered fraud and compliance platform that has raised $145.6M in total funding. Previously a top inventor at PayPal where his device intelligence product saved the company $40M+ annually in fraud losses, Zahid then led risk and security product teams at Uber and Revolut before co-founding Sardine in April 2020 alongside Soups Ranjan and Aditya Goel. Sardine now profiles 2.2+ billion devices and achieved 130% YoY ARR growth in 2024.
Jonathan Ebinger is a General Partner at BlueRun Ventures and Co-Founder of Transform Capital, a late-stage growth fund built on an unprecedented philanthropic model that donates half the traditional GP carry to universities and nonprofits. With nearly 25 years in venture capital, he backed PayPal as one of its first institutional investors, led Series A investments in Kabbage (acquired by American Express), Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), and Waze (acquired by Google for $1.15B), and championed the thesis that real-time data would reshape lending, payments, and enterprise procurement. His four-factor investment framework - team, market, technology, and whether the company actually matters - reflects a philosophy that has made him one of Silicon Valley's most recognizable early-stage fintech investors.
Lauren Green is the Chief of Staff to the CEO and Head of Business Operations at Medeloop, a San Francisco-based AI clinical research platform that raised a $15.5M Series A in November 2024. A Stanford Management Science & Engineering graduate (Class of 2021) and former Division I swimmer who earned All-American honors, Lauren moved from PayPal's operations and engineering program management teams into the high-growth healthcare AI startup world, where she helps orchestrate strategy, business operations, and organizational development for a company rebuilding how medical research gets done.
Rohini Mukand is a Partner on the HR team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. With a career spanning HR leadership at some of tech and retail's biggest names - Amazon (AWS and Alexa), eBay/PayPal, Ross Stores, and Delivery Agent - she now helps shape the people strategy behind a firm managing over $39 billion in assets. Educated at Swarthmore College in Sociology and Anthropology, she brings a humanist lens to the high-stakes world of building technology organizations.
Sir Michael Moritz KBE is a Welsh-born venture capitalist and author who spent nearly 38 years at Sequoia Capital, becoming one of the most successful investors in technology history. A former Time magazine journalist who wrote the first history of Apple, he backed Google at a $100 million valuation, Yahoo with a 24-hour ultimatum, and PayPal before anyone knew what digital payments meant. Diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer in 2006, he kept investing for another 17 years. In 2025 he published 'Ausländer,' a memoir about his family's escape from Nazi Germany — and announced he was applying for German citizenship.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in recorded history and the founder or co-founder of nine major companies including SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and Neuralink. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he taught himself to code at 10, sold his first game at 12, and dropped out of a Stanford PhD after two days to chase the internet gold rush. His companies collectively own 65% of all operational Earth satellites, produce the world's best-selling electric vehicles, and are actively building brain-computer interfaces and rockets to colonize Mars. As of May 2026, his net worth stands at approximately $809 billion.
Roelof Frederik Botha is a South African-American venture capitalist and former Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied VC firms. Grandson of South African foreign minister Pik Botha, he rose from PayPal CFO at age 28 - overseeing the company's IPO and $1.5B sale to eBay - to become one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors. He wrote the original investment memo for YouTube when the company had 3 employees and a valuation of $11.5M; Google bought it 14 months later for $1.65B. Over two decades at Sequoia, he backed YouTube, Instagram, Block (Square), MongoDB, Unity, Natera, and dozens more, generating over $50 billion in returns for limited partners. He stepped down as Sequoia's Senior Steward in November 2025.
Chad Meredith Hurley (born January 24, 1977, Reading, PA) is an American entrepreneur and tech visionary best known as the co-founder and first CEO of YouTube, which he built alongside Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005 and sold to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion - just 18 months after launch. Armed with a Fine Arts degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania rather than a computer science background, Hurley's design instincts shaped YouTube's iconic UI and pioneered the embeddable video player that fueled viral growth; he had previously designed the original PayPal logo during his job interview. After stepping down from YouTube in 2010, he co-founded AVOS Systems and MixBit, launched the sports gaming platform GreenPark Sports (which raised $53M+), and in 2023 founded EyeTell, an AI-powered video script generation startup. He holds minority ownership stakes in the Golden State Warriors (NBA), LA Football Club (MLS), and Leeds United (EPL), and received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2019. Estimated at $700-800 million in net worth, Hurley remains a prolific investor and quiet force in Silicon Valley, famously reclusive despite his outsized impact on how the world creates and consumes video.
Jeff Jordan is a General Partner (now semi-retired) at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he spent over a decade backing marketplace and consumer companies including Airbnb, Pinterest, and Instacart. A rare operator-turned-investor, he was President of PayPal, CEO of OpenTable (steering its 2009 IPO through the financial crisis), and SVP at eBay where he oversaw the acquisitions of PayPal and Half.com. His framework on marketplace dynamics - built from running some of the most important digital marketplaces in history - became a foundational body of thinking in Silicon Valley.
Luke Nosek is a Polish-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, where he served as VP of Marketing and Strategy. He later co-founded Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, before launching Gigafund in 2017, a venture firm focused on transformative technologies. As the first institutional investor in SpaceX and board member since 2008, Nosek has championed ambitious, decades-long investments in space exploration, AI, and frontier technologies, embodying a contrarian approach to venture capital that prioritizes world-changing impact over short-term returns.
Steve Chen is a Taiwanese-American Internet entrepreneur and software engineer best known as co-founder and former CTO of YouTube, which he and his PayPal colleagues built in 2005 and sold to Google for $1.65 billion just 18 months later. Born in Taipei and immigrating to the U.S. at age seven, Chen dropped out of the University of Illinois computer science program to join PayPal as one of its first 10 employees. After revolutionizing online video sharing with YouTube, he co-founded AVOS Systems, launched the video app MixBit, joined Google Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence, and eventually returned to Taiwan to nurture the island's startup ecosystem and connect Taiwanese entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley.
Kevin Hartz is a Silicon Valley serial founder and venture investor who co-founded Eventbrite (NYSE: EB) and Xoom (acquired by PayPal for $1.1B), made seed-stage bets on PayPal, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Palantir, Square, Stripe, and Slack, and now runs A* Capital — a $300M early-stage fund that bets heavily on teenage founders. His career spans 30+ years of building and backing transformative tech companies from Berkeley to the world stage.
Max Levchin is a Ukrainian-American tech entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, where he served as CTO and helped build one of the world's first large-scale digital payment systems. He later founded Slide (acquired by Google for $182M), Glow (women's health app, 25M users), and most prominently Affirm - the publicly traded buy-now-pay-later leader with $3.22B in FY2025 revenue. Levchin is also a cryptography advocate (creator of the Levchin Prize), early Yelp investor and chairman, and co-founder of SciFi VC with his wife Nellie.
Matt Lerner is the founder and CEO of SYSTM, a growth coaching and accelerator program for seed-stage startups. A former PayPal GM who helped grow the SMB business from $800M to $10B+, and ex-500 Startups partner who ran the Distro Dojo growth program in London, he now works personally with up to 80 founders per year helping them find their growth levers. He is the author of 'Growth Levers and How to Find Them,' an international bestseller advocating that 10% of what startups try drives 90% of their growth.
Kent C. Dodds is a world-renowned web development educator, open source engineer, and entrepreneur based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Creator of React Testing Library and the Testing Library ecosystem, he left a staff engineering role at PayPal in 2019 to build a self-employed education empire spanning EpicReact.dev, EpicWeb.dev, TestingJavaScript.com, and now EpicAI.pro. Recognized as a Google Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, and GitHub Star, he has taught tens of thousands of developers through hands-on workshops, books, courses, and his long-running newsletter. Father of six and an adrenaline enthusiast who snowboards and rides a onewheel, Kent believes that kindness and teaching compound faster than any technology trend.